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Food

Favorable chain reaction

Pollo Tropical and BJ's are welcome additions to Pinellas Park.

By LAURA REILEY
Published May 10, 2007

ADVERTISEMENT [Times photo: Lara Cerri] BJ's Restaurant and Brewhouse has a large menu and a wide array of beers. [Times photo: Lara Cerri] From left, Armelia Williams, Eloise B. Maxwell and Nancy McLaurin enjoy the tastes of Pollo Tropical.

PINELLAS PARK – The Shoppes at Park Place are swimming in familiar names: Starbucks, Target, Chick-fil-A, Office Depot, Michaels.

Two recent entries are household names elsewhere but represent fresh faces in the Tampa Bay area.

Pollo Tropicals dot dozens of street corners in the greater Miami-Dade area, and the state of California is awash in BJ's Restaurants. Both have opened side-by-side in the newly reconfigured shopping center in the past couple months. This is the only Pollo Tropical outpost in Pinellas County (the Tampa Bay area had several in the mid 1990s, but all have since disappeared) and BJ's first foray into the state.

Both are welcome additions, bringing new concepts and fresh menus to an already robust chain-restaurant scene.

Miami-based Pollo Tropical, as the name suggests, is built around a Caribbean-style, citrus-marinated grilled chicken, served in a clean, bright, fast food environment. Value meals and "combo mambos" mostly weigh in at less than $6, with healthful alternatives to deep fryer-intensive competitors.

One lunch's combo packed a moist chicken leg and thigh onto a foam plate with a couple of grilled pork ribs and a skewer of shrimp (one of the splurgier items on the menu at $8.55). The "pollo" in question had a tasty, thin burnished skin, not exactly crisp, with a mild paprikalike flavor; the ribs, fall-off-the-bone tender, are shellacked with a sweet tropical sauce with hints of clove. Shrimp get a generous baste of butter and a little salt and pepper before their expert visit to the grill.

Combo dishes are flanked by plastic ramekins containing agreeable sides – choose pleasant, soupy black beans or tomato wedges and lengths of red onion brightened by a balsamic vinaigrette. A nearby mound of yellow rice, studded with green bell pepper, peas and carrot, doesn't do much but provide a medium over which the black beans can be poured. Better starches are to be found in a side of garlicky yucca or sweetly caramelized plantain.

A little Latin music (a Spanish language version of I Will Survive), a generous condiment bar featuring guava barbecue sauce and zingy curry mayo and an airy interior give Pollo Tropical a leg up on most fast food outposts.

The Pinellas Park location marks the 75th company-owned Pollo Tropical. BJ's Restaurants is no slouch with 57 casual eateries -– some of them BJ's Restaurant and Brewery, others called BJ's Restaurant and Brewhouse, still others BJ's Pizza & Grill. Traded on the Nasdaq market, the slick company clusters 35 of its restaurants in California and the rest are mostly spread elsewhere out west. The one that opened here March 13 is a BJ's Restaurant and Brewhouse.

The best way to describe it?

It's got the breezy, oversized scale of a California Pizza Kitchen, married with the deep-dish pizzas of Uno's, but with the encyclopedic spiral-bound menu of Cheesecake Factory. Oh, but add to all that interesting beer.

While peering around at the WPA-style murals and handsome design elements (fun garage doors separating dining spaces; an eclectic array of crystal chandeliers and rice paper lamps), start out with a beer sampler, four tasters for $4.95 or $5.50. The Harvest hefeweizen ($4.25 a pint) has a telltale banana nose, the Piranha pale ale ($4.25) is robustly hoppy, and Tatonka stout ($4.25) features a creamy, bitter chocolate backbone.

Fortified, start leafing through the menu. A passel of little sliders ($6.95) brings Angus beef patties, not particularly flavorful, on nice little buns with a sparse dose of sauteed onions. A good starter when followed by a meal-sized barbecue chicken chopped salad ($9.75), an improvement on the similar salad – chicken, corn, jicama, black beans, etc. – served at similar places because it's topped by crunchy onion strings.

And yes, onion strings improve most things.

Signature deep-dish pizzas come in four sizes with the requisite range of toppings, from a decadent "great white" alfredo-drizzled version to "the works" or a pie of your own devising ($8.95-$21.65). And if you revel in too much of a good thing, BJ's offers dessert cookie "pizzas" (called, somewhat inelegantly, "pizookies") topped with ice cream.

Maybe Pinellas Park isn't better off with an invasion of pizookies, but BJ's and Pollo Tropical each manage to fill a refreshing gastronomic niche.

Laura Reiley dines anonymously and unannounced. The St. Petersburg Times pays all expenses. A restaurant's advertising has nothing to do with selection for review or the assessment. Reiley can be reached at (727) 892-2293 or lreiley@sptimes.com.

Pollo Tropical

3900 Park Blvd., Pinellas Park

(727) 362-9600

Cuisine: Fast food

Hours: 10:30 a.m. to midnight daily

Details: American Express, Visa, MasterCard; no reservations; no liquor.

Prices: Entrees $1.79-$8.55

BJ's Restaurant & Brewhouse

3800 Park Blvd., Pinellas Park

(727) 525-4640

Cuisine: American brewhouse

Hours: 11 a.m. to midnight Sunday through Thursday; 11 a.m. to 1 a.m. Friday and Saturday.

Details: American Express, Visa, MasterCard; reservations for parties of 10 or more; full bar.

Prices: Entrees $7.25-$18.95

[Last modified May 9, 2007, 11:32:11]